I've known for several years that I have a problem with alcohol, but one thing held me back from reaching out for help more than anything else. For a full decade, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, my wife and I would enjoy a bottle (or sometimes two) of wine on a romantic getaway or special dinner, then we'd return home and not touch it again for weeks or even months. I still believe that we could have sustained that pace indefinitely without any downside. I think it might have been during the Great Trouble of 1999, when we nearly lost our oldest son, that I first brought a bottle of wine home.
Throughout the drinking escalation of recent years, I've always wanted so bad to believe that I could go back to the pace of the early years. The images of those candlelight dinners in sometimes faraway places are still really powerful today, in large part because of the evenings that followed. And if you aren't in your 50s yet, please take my word for it... romance isn't what it is in your 20s or 30s. It doesn't have to fade, but it very definitely does change. Things that once worked a certain way for each partner, first emotionally and also physically, don't work the same anymore. You have to find new paths... all the while trying different approaches to the old ways, hoping ardently that some new door opens that leads back to one of those steamy evenings.
That need to recover the old magic was so powerful that it completely blinded me for a long time to what my drinking was doing to our romance. Simply put, that same wine that was once the catalyst had become the destroyer. What once brought us together became the thing that very nearly drove us apart.
The terrible night that finally caused me to admit that I had a problem began on the evening of Valentine's Day. She had planned a wonderful getaway at a fabulous hotel, to be continued the next morning at their spa. We (mostly me) polished off a bottle of champagne shortly after getting to our room, and I got into another bottle before dinner from the goodie basket she had so lovingly put together. I wasn't yet lit too badly, so we ordered more wine with dinner.
Somewhere over the course of the dinner and the accompanying wine, I tipped over into that hyper-charged state where any emotion (good or bad) is amplified... and then the waiter said something wrong. I would normally have let it go without any response, but in that state, I went off on him. It was such a bad scene that she was completely humiliated and went up to the room. I closed out, but not before almost getting into a fight with a guy in the bathroom who had witnessed the wretched scene... and I'm a guy that is completely non-violent when sober!
I made my way back to the room, and we had a horrible fight. Finally, when she began to fear that we would be thrown out because of all the shouting, she left. And I passed out. She walked several miles to get home, in part to clear her head and try to figure out what to do with me.
She rode her bike back to the hotel the next morning, ready to leave me. But I was sober by then, and for the first time admitted out loud that I had a problem. During the long conversation that followed, we patched it up well enough to stay and enjoy the spa day that she had planned all along. But nothing was ever the same after that.
I had humiliated her with my intoxication numerous times before that miserable evening, and also many times since. I was convinced for years that our precipitous romantic decline was the catalyst for the depression that became the engine of my drinking. But what I didn't let myself see for so long was the fact that the head of the snake was eating its tail, and that it had become a vicious circle. How could any woman open herself to a man in my state?
